Can anything make Mark Zuckerberg feel anything, unless it physically involves Mark Zuckerberg himself, perhaps being kicked in the head by choice? Or is emotion the Meta boss’s phantom limb, twitching semi-regularly as a reminder of what he hacked off back in his Harvard dorm room all those years ago, as he began the long journey toward behavioural-modification, misinformation-spreading and selling the lives of billions of users to advertisers?
Please: try to picture him feeling something. Conjure Zuckerberg’s face as he scrolls through content he is unwilling to remove from any of his platforms, the sort of horrors that could destroy the sanity of a sweatshopped Kenyan moderator inside of six weeks, but which merely have Zuck reaching ice-bloodedly for a free speech argument. Try to imagine his reaction to whistleblower testimony before some parliament or other about Facebook’s ruinous impacts on young people, while wondering inside why he ever even toyed with getting into politics, given that all politicians are merely junior personnel.
How did you do? I got nothing, bar visual definitions of words and phrases like “impassive”, “affectless” and “emotionally barren”. Maybe this is what leads a guy to accept Elon Musk’s ironic challenge to a cage fight. That said, maybe Mark and his would-be duellist were subconsciously put out that the world’s attention was on other billionaires for much of this week – the pair of them cursing their magic mirrors for telling them that they were no longer the billionairest of them all, and feeling that something out of the ordinary run of twattery was needed. God knows, the eyeballs business is a tough game.
For whatever reason, then, one or other of these tech bros has got served by the other one. Twitter boss Musk seems to have been put out by news that Meta is planning to release a Twitter-style product called Threads (which, like everything Meta does, could easily end up less cheery than even the movie of the same name ). “I’m sure Earth can’t wait to be exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options,” remarked Musk , who presumably sees himself as Earth’s other option. I know what you’re thinking – it’s not just that our species has no dignity. It’s that it has no path to dignity.
Anyway, when someone pointed out that Zuckerberg now does karate or something, Musk replied on his social media platform: “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.” Hugely keen that Elon shouldn’t lol his way out of this one, Zuckerberg took to his own social media platform to pick up the gauntlet, posting simply: “Send me the location.” The Vegas Octagon has now been suggested. I guess it’s just like Somerset Maugham said: “It’s not enough to succeed; one’s tiny peer group must also fall to one’s guillotine choke.” Or as a Meta spokesperson put it about the prospective match: “The story speaks for itself” – which is certainly the truest thing any Meta spokesperson has ever said. Not that that means a lot.
This being the fight game, the wildly opportunistic Ultimate Fighting Championship president, Dana White, already claims to have spoken to both Musk and Zuckerberg, and professes them “dead serious” about the fight. “Mark hit me up first and said, ‘Is [Elon] serious?’” related White. “And I said, ‘I don’t know, let me ask him.’ I asked him, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m dead serious.’” On every rational level the match seems about as likely to actually happen as big tech regulating itself – then again, rule nothing out with guys who can’t feel.
That said, does any of this speak well of the times in which we live? It’s a struggle to conceive of the relatively less-powerful titans of the gilded age feeling the need for this sort of thing. “Introducing, first, fighting out of New York via Dunfermline, Scotland, its Andreeeeeew Caaaaaarnegie! And now, fighting out of New York, New York – it’s John! D! ROCKEFELLER!” Naturally, though, this is not a question preoccupying Dana White. “This would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world, bigger than anything that’s ever been done,” he explained mildly. “It would break all pay-per-view records. These guys would raise hundreds of millions of dollars for charity.”
Ah, there it is – the C word. A reminder: if two of the world’s very richest men wish to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for charity, they could simply … write a cheque for some of their small change. Last year their fellow gazillionaire Jeff Bezos made a huge public fanfare of giving $100m to genuine philanthropist Dolly Parton so she could disburse it. And yet, given Jeff’s incomprehensibly enormous earnings, donating $100m was the equivalent of someone on the UK median salary donating £34.56 to charity. Except the person on the UK median typically pays their taxes, whereas Jeff notoriously avoids pretty much all of his, so … thanks for almost literally nothing, big guy. Can you be goaded into the Octagon, too?
While this story remains developing, it’s notable how it moves on from yesterday’s dystopian fictional visions of tomorrow. Those typically saw impoverished people forced to fight for megarich weirdos, or to participate in death games to entertain them, or occasionally to be hunted by them. Perhaps at some level we should salute the megarich weirdo community for coming up with something even more box office: the prospect of their underlings watching them pinch and scratch each other in a Silicon Valley derby you’d be honestly overjoyed for either side to lose (though both would be the dream). Alas, the alternative, more realistic perspective is that everyone else is still the victim of the megarich weirdos – which is such an unpleasant feeling that one can quite see the benefits of not feeling at all.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
